TGMS General Meeting

Doors will be open at 7:00 p.m. and the meeting will start at 7:30 p.m.

FOR: TGMS Members and open to the public

GUEST SPEAKER:Dr. Eugene S. Meieran

Gene Meieran received his Bachelor's in Metallurgy from Purdue in 1959, and his Doctorate from MIT in 1963 in Material Science. He joined Fairchild Semiconductor R&D in 1963, and moved to Intel in 1973, retiring from Intel as a Senior Fellow in 2009. Gene has taught x-ray diffraction at the University of California, and Stanford University. He has given seminars and talks worldwide and has about 50 technical papers. He has been awarded three international awards for his work as well as being awarded honorary an honorary Doctorate from Purdue University. Gene currently resides in Portland, OR, with his wife, Rosalind, but has recently established a part-time home in Tucson

Gene started collecting minerals in 1949 in Norway, his father’s homeland, and has continued this for the past 66 years; indeed, his studies in Materials Science are a direct result of his interest incrystals. For the past 15 years, he has assembled educational and competitive exhibits for the Tucson Gem and Mineral show, for which he's won several Lidstrom and Desautel’s trophies. Gene has donated important specimens to many museums, including the Arizona Mineral Museum in Tucson, (where he is Chairman of the Board), Harvard, the Rice Mineral Museum of the Northwest and to the Smithsonian. He was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 2003.

LECTURE TITLE: "Civilization and Face Centered Cubic Crystals"

Human civilization is fundamentally related to the discovery, use and development of natural resources for armaments, agriculture, energy, coinage, jewelry, art and many other applications. Indeed, periods of civilization are named for materials; the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and what now might be called the Silicon Age. But while silica may have ushered in the start of societal growth, with flint used for starting fires and arrowheads, the real start of technology was based on a peculiar set of metallic and semi-metallic native elements; copper, iron, carbon (diamond), lead, silver, aluminum, and now silicon (refined from silica). These materials have many features in common; they are abundant and are found in large ore bodies; they are often ductile and can be made into complicated shapes but can also be extremely hard; they each have a unique property (hardness, strength, magnetism, corrosion resistance, attractiveness, melting point, etc) that makes them particularly useful. And they all have face-centered-cubic structures; it is this crystallographic property that is largely responsible for the advancement of civilization and the subject of Gene's talk!

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Since 1946

A community committed to geology, mineralogy, lapidary and allied earth sciences, the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society, Inc. is a non-profit organization, established in 1946 by a small group interested in mineral knowledge and appreciation.